A more Pride-ful Olympics

WestEnder
February 18, 2010

Despite considerable political and social gains made by the LGBT community in recent years, only a small number of athletes in the professional sporting world have come out publicly as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered. The stakes remain high for those who do reveal their sexual identity, as exemplified by U.S. college basketball coach Rene Portland’s well-documented reign of terror over the Pennsylvania State University women’s basketball team. Portland, who resigned from her 27-year coaching position in 2007, was known to vilify and remove players she suspected to be lesbian. That same year, John Amaechi came out of the closet after retiring from the National Basketball Association, sparking controversy among other players.

It makes sense, then, that choosing to keep one’s sexual identity private can stem from a desire for privacy and consistency in one’s career, says Greg Larocque, president of the North American arm of the Gay and Lesbian International Sports Association (GLISA).

“I don’t think it’s a safe thing to do yet, when you’re trying to make money [as a professional athlete], because it kind of becomes your Achilles heel,” Larocque says. “I think that’s a reality in the corporate world: When you buck what some people see as mainstream thinking, you have a challenge to [earn] your way... Also, I think there’s a certain privacy people want to have around their [personal] lives.”

Those same conditions extend to heterosexual athletes, the most high-profile example being golfer Tiger Woods, who was trounced by media and the public when information about his extra-marital affairs became public, Larocque points out. “He offended what many individuals, particularly in the corporate sector, thought was a basic sense of ethics.”

Larocque also attributes the lack of ‘out’ pro athletes to a fear of being labelled the sports world’s voice of the gay community. “If you don’t want to be used as a model or whatever, I don’t think you’re going to come out,” he says. “And if you want to be earning your way, where the public voice and its intolerances have an impact, I don’t think you want to come out.”

Given the intolerance and injustices that continue to be directed towards gay athletes, Larocque commends the efforts of the community organizers who opened Pride House, the first queer-friendly spaces to be established during an Olympic Games, in Vancouver and Whistler as part of the 2010 Winter Games. A joyful opening celebration took place February 11 at Qmunity, a queer resource centre in the Davie Village.

“I’m not sure, quite frankly, that Pride House is necessary for us in Vancouver [or] in many parts of Canada, but I think it is critical for people that are coming here from other parts of the world to see how it is when you have a truly diverse and respectful society,” Larocque says. “Other countries, frankly, are behind us in terms of the evolution of these issues.”

Former Olympic swimmer and Vancouver resident Marion Lay is no stranger to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. “When I started in my career, I was terrified that someone would out me,” she told the audience at the Pride House opening. “In sport, coaches and administrators make many of the decisions, still, and they often are biased. Many people are afraid of coming out... Many of the athletes that you’ll be seeing in these Games are trying to lead a hidden life. At the same time, they’re trying to be the best they can be. It’s a very difficult place to be.”

Lay praised Pride House for its provision of a safe haven for gay athletes in an otherwise “fearful” sporting world. “There’s no safer place in the world than Vancouver to come out and make a very strong statement,” she said.

“This has never happened before,” Qmunity executive director Jennifer Breakspear told the crowd at the Pride House opening. “Never has there been something of this scope; never has there been a recognized entity that is a welcome space.”

As part of continuing the city’s tradition as a welcoming space for gay athletes, Vancouver will host the 2011 North American Outgames next summer, using 2010 Olympic venues. Recalling the GLISA North American Outgames that were held in Calgary in 2007, Larocque says, “I think it was a very good thing to do, to have them see the real people as opposed to the stereotypes. That’s what’s so critically important about Pride House: that people who visit it — whether they be athletes or whether they be coaches, or whether they be family and friends, or whether they just be visitors — they actually get to see that these people in this particular community or this particular lifestyle are no different from anybody else.”

Truly green Games?

WestEnder
February 18, 2010

A little-known fact about the Olympic Movement is that the environment has been one of its three official pillars since 1994, when it was added to the Olympic Charter alongside culture and sport. The Vancouver 2010 Winter Games have been promoted by various levels of government and corporate sponsors as the greenest Games ever. Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson announced Tuesday (Feb. 16) that the city’s Olympic Village has been certified as the greenest neighbourhood in the world. But some say the environmental footprint of the Games leaves much to be desired.

Earlier this month, the David Suzuki Foundation released its Climate Scorecard for the 2010 Winter Games, awarding Olympic organizers a bronze medal for their efforts.

“VANOC [the Vancouver Organizing Committee] has estimated that they’re going to reach three billion people around the world, and you don’t get opportunities like that very often,” says Paul Lingl of the David Suzuki Foundation. “We just have not seen them take advantage of all the opportunities they’ve had.”

Lingl points to VANOC’s lack of public-outreach programs related to sustainability and the environment as one of the major shortcomings of its “green” Games. “It would have been an opportunity for VANOC to tell its story and to really raise the profile of the environment pillar of the Games, but it just wasn’t adopted,” he says.

The Climate Scorecard cites public engagement as the area where VANOC had the least success in its sustainability initiatives. The Scorecard also notes that Vancouver has missed opportunities to create lasting reductions in transportation emissions, even though it is estimated that the 2010 Games will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 15 per cent as compared to past Olympic Games.

The David Suzuki Foundation is not alone in critiquing Vancouver’s so-called green Games. A group of environmental advocates gathered at East Vancouver’s Centre for Socialist Education last week (Feb. 11) to speak out publicly against the “greenwashing” they feel is at the centre of the Olympics’ sustainability initiatives.

“While the focus of the Games has been here in Vancouver, the bulk of the environmental destruction, unfortunately, has been happening in Whistler, in our back country,” Pina Belperio told reporters. Belperio is part of the Council of Canadians, a national social-justice organization, and Whistler Watch, a citizen watchdog group monitoring Olympic activity in Whistler. “Probably the biggest impact has been at the Callaghan, which we call the Callaghan Valley, but is known to most of the outside world as the Whistler Olympic Park,” Belperio continued. “That area used to be primarily old-growth forest and second-growth forest, and, to date, the estimates that we’ve seen are a loss of a total of 100,000 trees or more” due to Olympic-related deforestation.

North of Whistler, Nesters Wetlands have been particularly impacted, Belperio added. “It used to be a rare, red-listed [endangered] wetland... That area now houses our new transit facility and the experimental hydrogen highway, which was a dream of Premier Gordon Campbell and the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzennegger,” she said. “To date, Whistler has lost 72 per cent of its wetlands.”

David Marshall, on the other hand, praises VANOC for its efforts promoting public awareness of sustainability issues. As the executive director of the Fraser Basin Council, Marshall chaired VANOC’s Board Advisory Committee on Sustainability Performance, a group that met twice a year between 2007 and 2009 to provide feedback and advice to VANOC’s sustainability team.

“I guess we could always do more, but we were very pleased with their initiatives,” says Marshall. “They really embraced a recommendation from us on the carbon-neutrality of the Games and trying to encourage others, when people attend the events, to try to reduce their carbon footprint.”

Marshall pointed to VANOC’s encouragement of using public transit during the Games as an example of public engagement around sustainability. “I think that message has got out... locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally,” he says. “Of course, you could always do more, but [we’re] one of the very few, if not the only, Olympic Games that’s had [sustainability] as one of their objectives, and, hopefully, that’s a start.”

Being single doesn't mean having to say you're sorry

WestEnder
February 11, 2010

Dan Brooks is a great guy. A 31-year-old senior programmer at a small web design studio, he’s smart, gregarious, and self-deprecatingly funny. Brooks likes his job and has an active social life, but like many people in their early thirties, he’s reminded daily of a personal, seemingly unchangeable reality that will continue to set him apart from many of his friends: he’s single.

When reached at his Burnaby office on a Thursday afternoon, Brooks has just finished another typical lunch hour with his co-workers, all in their twenties and thirties. Their meals have been lovingly prepared for them by spouses or significant others, and Brooks has once again been left to navigate the nearby shopping mall food court by himself. As the single black sheep in an office full of connubial bliss, Brooks’ co-workers are constantly trying to set him up and otherwise badgering him about being single — they’ve even gone so far as to chip in for an online dating membership, signing him up in secret. “My co-workers are probably rougher on me than most of my other friends,” he admits. “It’s kind of weird, coming to work and having to defend myself in that way.”

While Brooks knows the light-hearted ribbing at work is well-intentioned and largely harmless, increasingly he finds himself to be the odd one out among friends and colleagues. “We talk about spouses a lot around the office. They’re such a big part of our culture, that me not having one is so foreign to them,” he says, laughing. “They’re like, ‘How can you survive?’ I guess my perspective is I’m a lot more independent. I rely on my friends, where they rely on their spouses.”

Forming a family bond with friends instead of blood relatives or lovers is a reality for many people of all ages and personal backgrounds. But being single, or worse yet, choosing to stay unmarried is often considered an unfortunate predicament in the eyes of mass culture.

A growing community of singles’ advocates, academics, and researchers has been exploring the sometimes problematic influence of marriage on society and individuals for the past decade. Author of 2006’s Singled Out: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After, Bella DePaulo is a leading scholar of what she calls “singleism,” discrimination against singles. DePaulo holds a Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard, is a regular contributor to online politics and lifestyle website Huffington Post, and runs the "Living Single" blog for Psychology Today. Reached by phone in California, where she works as a professor at UC Santa Barbara, DePaulo sounds cheerfully optimistic about marriage’s diminishing hold on society.

“You have what I call matrimania — this over-the-top celebration of marriage and coupling and weddings. I think the reason that’s happening is not because our society is so secure about the place of marriage, but because it’s so insecure,” she says. “It used to be that if you wanted to have sex without being stigmatized, if you wanted to have kids, if you were a woman and wanted to have economic security — all those things were dependent on marriage. And now women can pick up the cheque at work and the sperm at the bank!”

The most prevalent concerns DePaulo hears from her single readers and colleagues are similar to Brooks’ situation at work. “The main complaints are that people in the workplace, colleagues — unfortunately, even bosses — think that if you’re single, you don’t have a life,” she says. “So all the married and coupled people can have first picks on vacation time, they get to leave work early for whatever excuse.”

Workplace discrimination on the basis of marital status is one of many policy-related issues explored by the Alternatives to Marriage Project (AtMP), a nationwide American organization based in Brooklyn, New York. AtMP advocates for equality and fairness for unmarried people, including those who are single, choose not to marry, cannot marry, or are in same-sex partnerships. Nicky Grist has worked as AtMP’s executive director since 2005 (she became involved with the group after stumbling upon its website, Unmarried.org, while trying to answer questions in her personal life about her marital status). “There’s no other organization out there doing this work,” Grist says, “even though the issues we work on are incredibly mainstream.”

Like DePaulo and Brooks, Grist points to the workplace as ground-zero for marital status discrimination. “People who would never dream of commenting on many other aspects of somebody’s life feel perfectly fine commenting on their marital status,” she says.

Grist feels the notion of marriage as the ideal way for adults to live is fading, which bodes well for a more equal future for singles and unmarried couples. Even so, the influence of marriage in pop culture and mainstream society is huge, and that won’t change quickly. “It makes perfect sense that people who want the world to feel ordered and consistent and safe will continue to promote the idea of marriage as one of the things that creates that order and safety, whether or not it’s true for people,” Grist says. “Marriage is an institution, a social institution, a legal institution. And these create comfort for a lot of people.”

Back in Vancouver, people like Brooks continue to be prodded by well-meaning co-workers and relatives about the importance of pairing up. While he continues to go on casual dates (independent of the defunct online dating profile set up by his coworkers), he’s loath to talk about them with friends or relatives because they’re not committed — and therefore acceptable — relationships. “My parents, they definitely want grandchildren. I’m an only child,” he says. “I always just tell them, ‘You should have had more children and increased your odds!’”

Arts groups, non-profits bracing for post-Olympic budget

WestEnder
February 11, 2010

With the Olympics set to hold the city’s attention for the next three weeks, the announcement of the provincial government’s 2010-2011 budget on March 2 will mark a swift return to reality. The Province’s widely-disputed freeze of funding for gaming grants — grants raised from provincial gambling revenues to fund not-for-profit and charity organizations — galvanized thousands of citizens, in particular members of the arts and culture community, who spoke out against the cuts in summer and fall 2009. Despite a November 2009 recommendation from the Province’s own Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services that recommended arts funding be restored to 2008-2009 levels in the upcoming budget, affected groups are preparing for the worst.

In anticipation of the provincial budget announcement, the B.C. Association for Charitable Gaming (BCACG) has obtained legal opinion from Vancouver lawyer Cameron Ward. In a Feb. 3 media release issued by BCACG, a statement from Ward says BCACG and the charitable organizations it represents have grounds to take legal action against the Province to seek restoration of gaming funds to appropriate levels. Failure to do so would violate the provincial government’s June 1999 Memorandum of Agreement, which committed one-third of casino revenues, indexed to inflation, to charities and non-government organizations.

“If this next budget on March 2 doesn’t address the issue, then the only option is either to say, ‘Well, I guess our society is changing,’ or to try and address it in a legal way,” says BCACG president Susan Marsden of her decision to seek legal opinion. She and the BCACG started consulting lawyers last fall when she felt the provincial government wasn’t responding to opposition to the cuts. “Our position was, it didn’t have discretion over this section of the gaming profits that has traditionally gone to charities,” she says, “because that had been entrenched in policy and practice for a long time.”

Given the widespread public protests against the cuts and torrent of letters written to MLAs in support of restoring gaming grants, public opinion supporting funding restoration is clear, Marsden says. “Nobody can say that every effort hasn’t been made to make the government aware of how devastating these cuts are across the board,” she says. “I do feel personally that the Olympics is one of the reasons that we have experienced all the cuts. It is amazing that you can basically devastate a sector and then turn around and try and celebrate it during the [Games].”

Amir Ali Alibhai, executive director of the Alliance for Arts and Culture, says he hopes the Cultural Olympiad will showcase what can be achieved with funding for the arts. “It’s an example of what actually quite a modest amount of investment from different levels of government... can create,” he says.

Alibhai emphasizes that gambling in the province has been expanded over the years with good-faith support from the charitable and not-for-profit sector, based on the understanding that gaming revenues would support their operation. “Otherwise, I don’t believe that many of the charities and cities and communities around the province would have ever considered allowing gaming to be expanded in their communities,” he says. “It is on that basis that I believe this social and moral contract is being broken, and the courts may agree.”

A representative of the B.C. Ministry of Housing and Social Development, which oversees community gaming grant funding for charitable and not-for-profit organizations, told WE that close to $115 million has been provided for community gaming grants for 2009/2010 as of January this year. As well, close to 5,000 grant applications have been approved, and $4.3 million in BC Arts Council grants will be distributed in early February 2010. The representative, who requested not to be named in this article, noted that “difficult decisions” were made last year, and priorities went to high-need services.

Fraser Institute issues 2010 Report Card on B.C. schools

WestEnder
February 11, 2010

When Glen Hansman was a teacher at Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith Elementary six years ago, the Fraser Institute, an international research organization, offered the Southeast Vancouver school an award for “most improved” school as part of its annual B.C. School Report Card. Given the controversy surrounding the Report Cards since their inception in 1998, the school declined the prize.

“We were all sort of scratching our heads going, ‘Well, we’re doing what we’re doing, we’re always striving to adjust our practice, we’re always striving to meet our students’ needs,’” Hansman recalls. “We weren’t paying attention to what the [Fraser Institute] rankings said the year before. That wasn’t driving what we were doing... [The high ranking to merit an award] was a fluke. It was a simple fluke.”

Over the past decade, the Fraser Institute has compiled the results of a province-wide test taken by Grade 4 and 7 students in B.C. public schools. The test, called the Foundation Skills Assessment, is mandated by the B.C. Ministry of Education, and has been administered by schools since the late 1990s. The Fraser Institute, an independent body that accepts no government money, has taken the test results, along with other school information such as average family income and the population of students speaking English as a second language, to compile its annual Report Card, which scores schools on a 10-point scale.

This year’s B.C. School Report Card was released February 5, showing results for 2005 through 2009. In 2009, Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith scored an overall rating of 7.2 out of 10, down from 7.6 the previous year. The Fraser Institute aims to show through its Report Cards how school performance has declined or improved over a number of years, thus allowing parents to compare their children’s schools to other schools in the community. But Hansman, now president of the Vancouver Elementary School Teachers’ Association, an arm of the BC Teachers’ Federation, maintains that the Report Card unnecessarily “shames and blames” schools by ranking them according to what he says is limited information. “There are many factors — whether it’s English as a second language, or whether people have enough food in their bellies when they come to school, or whether there’s something going on in a particular community— that simply wouldn’t be recognized in that small, narrow little snapshot,” he says.

The Fraser Institute’s Peter Cowley says the tests are a useful tool for people to compare schools. As the Institute’s director of school performance studies, he has co-authored the annual Report Cards since their inception. “The reason it’s useful is it enables you to compare schools, one with another,” he says. “It’s useful as an informational tool when making a decision on where to send your children, and likewise, when parents use it as an annual report on how the school is doing.”

Cowley notes that Section 2 of the B.C. School Act has given parents the right to send their child to any public school in the province — whether or not the school is in the family’s school catchment area — since 2002. “If [parents] have an opportunity to choose from more than one school, many want to be as informed as possible, and will therefore consult any source of evidence or source of information with regard to the school and how it’s doing,” he says.

Cowley adds the Report Cards should act as a springboard for parents to seek other information about school performance, such as from a school’s principal and other sources. “We would never suggest that parents only look at the Report Card and then make a decision on it. Much the opposite,” he says. “Now, on the other hand, if the principal says, ‘Well, I don’t believe in anything the Fraser Institute puts out, and neither should you,’ then, as a parent, I think I’d start looking for another school the next day.”

The Report Cards, Cowley says, are popular among parents; no other organization offers comparative information on public schools in B.C. “We believe it’s important, for the benefit of the kids, to encourage improvement in schools by enabling both parents and educators to have the opportunity to compare those schools on the basis of some objective evidence of performance,” he says.

“Mr Cowley, he believes in competition,” Hansman counters. “What I would say to that is, the province of British Columbia has ranked the worst in child poverty in Canada for the past six, seven years. There’s a ranking.”

The Fraser Institute’s most recent B.C. School Report Card is available online at BritishColumbia.CompareSchoolRankings.org.

PHOTO: Glen Hansman, president of the Vancouver Elementary School Teachers’ Association president, Glen Hansman says the Fraser Insitute’s Report Card on B.C. schools is an inadequate representation of student progress. By Doug Shanks.

More West End renters cry foul

WestEnder
February 4, 2010

Hollyburn Properties, a Vancouver-based property management company, has repeatedly come under fire in recent years from West End renters who claim the company has issued unreasonable rent increases and implemented unfair “renovictions” (eviction for the purpose of renovations). Last month, tenants of another Hollyburn apartment building alerted WE to rent increases that exceed the annual limit allowed by the provincial government. Yet while the manager of the building says those increases are “an isolated circumstance,” a similar situation has taken place at the same building twice in the last nine years.

In 2001, tenants of the Windsor apartment building, at 1924 Barclay Street, disputed rent increases at the Residential Tenancy Office; in 2004, landlords began evicting tenants with the justification that unoccupied suites would be necessary during renovations.

Most recently, two Windsor tenants received a letter from Hollyburn, dated January 8, asking them to sign off approval of a rent increase that would bring their suites up to market value. While the requested increases are at least three times the 3.2-per-cent annual allowable increase set by the B.C. government for 2010, Hollyburn cites a provision in the province’s Residential Tenancy Act that allows for increases above the annual allowable amount if those increases serve to bring the a suite up to market value.

“These residents are paying rent that is substantially below market value,” Hollyburn property manager Allan Wasel told WE. “We are committed to working with these residents to ensure they understand that the increases will be put toward the cost of general maintenance to the building. I can confirm that we do not plan to adjust the rents of any other residents at this time.”

Wasel’s claim that there are no plans to increase rents for other Windsor tenants is cold comfort for Sharon Isaak and Janine Fuller, residents of the Hollyburn-owned Bay Tower apartment building, at 1461 Harwood Street. Both Isaak and Fuller received controversial rent-increase requests in 2006, similar to those recently issued at the Windsor. The Bay Tower increases eventually led to floor-by-floor evictions that Isaak and Fuller brought to a historic B.C. Supreme Court ruling the following year. After a lengthy battle, Isaak and Fuller won the right to stay in their suits, where they still live.

The Bay Tower case also sparked the genesis of Renters at Risk, a West End-based tenant advocacy group, of which Isaak and Fuller are active members.

“[Signing off on] the additional rent increase [letter] in good faith does not mean you are safe,” Fuller says. “I signed the rent increase and I was the first tenant evicted a few months later for renovations.”

“Companies count on the fact that people don’t know their rights, don’t know their neighbours, and are not aware of the rental history at a building,” adds Isaak.

The history of rent increases at the Windsor was news to 24-year-old Kate Kunicky, who has lived in a bachelor suite in the building for four years. She received a letter asking for a $128 increase on top of her $872 monthly rent. If Kunicky consented to the request, the letter specified that she would be entitled to a reduction on the proposed increase to $75.

For a young person living away from her family home for the first time, Kunicky already considers her current rent at the Windsor to be more than she’d like to pay. “As a single person, one income, trying to support yourself and start off in the world, it is a lot to pay,” she says. “For someone who’s been such a faithful, low-maintenance tenant, to have this [increase] show up out of the blue — it’s really shocking to me.”

Kunicky and the occupant of a one-bedroom unit were the only Windsor tenants to be issued the increase letter last month. But West End Residents Association director Christine Ackermann, who lives in a Hollyburn-owned building across the street from the Windsor, and who disputed a “renoviction” notice she received from Hollyburn in spring 2008, is frustrated by what she sees as repeat behaviour on the part of Hollyburn — and troubling complacency on the part of the provincial government, which oversees housing and residential-tenancy law.

“Usually, in society, when the courts start to hand down decisions... society reacts and new laws are made... In this case, the government completely ignores the court,” Ackermann says of what she and other tenant advocates view as necessary changes that need to be made in B.C.’s Residential Tenancy Act. “They are not changing the legislation... Laws have been put in place to allow [landlords] to be greedy.”

VIVO prepares a different sort of Olympic activity

WestEnder
February 4, 2010

While the Cultural Olympiad’s program of international arts performances is seemingly as vast as the athletic proceedings of the 2010 Winter Games, VIVO Media Arts is a black sheep in a cultural landscape otherwise saturated with Olympic affiliations. Following a controversial decision in 2006 to refuse project funding from the Cultural Olympiad, VIVO’s studio, at 3rd and Main, will operate as an independent hub for artists and activists during the Olympics, consistent with VIVO’s 37-year-old mandate of providing a space for local artistic experimentation and collaboration.

Organized by a group of VIVO members as part of a collective called VIVO 2010: Safe Assembly, VIVO’s Games-time activities will take the form of lecture and presentation series, broadcasts from a radio station designed by and for VIVO during the Games, and other artistic projects that members hope will contribute to a multi-media archive of local responses to the Olympics.

“We felt that [not participating in the Cultural Olympiad] would put us in a strong position to be able to critically look at what’s happening in the city: what’s going on with the Olympics, where mistakes are being made, where good things might be happening, and not having to be looking over our shoulder,” VIVO general manager Emma Hendrix says of the decision to refuse funding from the Cultural Olympiad. Hendrix acknowledges the decision was difficult, given that most arts organizations, including VIVO, operate on a limited budget and typically welcome financial assistance.

However, the need for Safe Assembly members to designate a space in which to produce creative responses to the Olympics — whether they take the form of broadcast media, visual arts, multi-media presentations, or lectures — became more important than funding.

One of the products of this decision will be the VIVO Afternoon School, co-presented with the Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society. Taking place on weekdays during the Olympics from 2 to 4 p.m., the Afternoon School will be made up of lectures, reading groups, film screenings from VIVO’s media archives, and interactive discussions, all of which are free and encouraging of public participation. “There wasn’t really an opportunity for [critical] response [to the Olympics] in Beijing in the same way that there’s an opportunity for response here,” says Cheyanne Turions, one of the Afternoon School’s programmers.

Among other pursuits, the Afternoon School will explore ideas of nationalism within the context of the Olympics, media representation of host cities, and the racialization of the Games.

Safe Assembly member Nicholas Perrin will coordinate a nighttime presentation series at VIVO called the Evening News, the first sessions of which will start on February 13 and 15 at 7 p.m. “It’s trying to facilitate a conversation or perform a kind of coalition-building around what the Olympics mean for our community,” Perrin says.

The Evening News, Perrin says, will operate as an open space for people to critically discuss the events of the Games. The program will take the form of presentations by local activists, as well as viewings of independent video footage and photographic materials collected during the Games. “It’s important for the community that this happens,” he says. “It’s important that we document it and get an archive.”

Archives generated through VIVO during the 2010 Games will be passed on to future Olympic host cities in the hope that what happens during Vancouver’s Olympics will be looked upon critically in the future.

More information on VIVO’s Olympic activity will be available on its website, VideoInStudios.com.

PHOTO: VIVO Media Arts members Alex Muir, Am Johal, and Cheyanne Turions are helping to organize special events taking place during the Olympics. By Doug Shanks.